Possibilities today

I13

...what is possible today? What would it look like if the people won? On the one hand, I believe that Lenin was right, a revolution can't be sustained without a very highly organized and disciplined central group. This is the big dilemma. On the other hand, a highly trained and disciplined central group tends to want to perpetuate itself and you can't have one and you can't have the other.

Indigenous struggles and deep democracy

I6

Working on [building settler solidarity with] Six Nations…[it] was very interesting...and inspiring to see Six Nations, which is this Indigenous group that has the oldest surviving democratic constitution in the world, who have been actively fighting colonialism for five hundred years, who have retained a great deal of their culture in the face of genocide, and still works by those sorts of principles that we were trying to discover in 2001. Things like consensus, broad deep forms of respect, broad forms of solidarity and affinity. They have methods for cultivating those that have lasted for literally thousands of years. So seeing that in action and also seeing what the state does in the face of that and how they try and divide and conquer was very inspirational and changed my thinking a great deal.

Care and organizing

I21

I think it's important to nurture people in the political movements that are important to me. So the form is as important as the content. So how we organize, and how we talk to each other, and how we behave is extremely important….a person I truly respec[t] once said to me that [the]...only...criteria for [being] progressive [is] they had to be interested in ideas and care about people and if they didn't have one or the other they were not progressive. So there are a lot of people in our progressive movements who either don't care about people or don't care about ideas...that's what I mean… [by] the converging of the social and the moral.

Post-activism

I2

Recently, as a result of being in a family, [I’ve] really change[d] the way...I'm socially engaging with…[the] activist community….I feel like there was a certain point at which I started to admire people that I considered post-activist. What I [mean] by that is that being an activist or revolutionary or whatever as your main title, that is abstract and has nothing to communicate other than that you feel righteously busy. [It’s] not something that...I want to identify [as] and I feel like there are some other really important things, really important roles....I want to be a good son to my parents, I want to be a good brother to my brother, I want to be a good parent, I want to be a good partner.

Political empowerment

I22

...voter turnout in provincial and national elections keeps on going down...I don't think it's a question of apathy...people have no real say in how things operate. That's one particular issue. Second, I think it's a question of empowering Canadians as a whole. I think first we have to begin with this electoral process which...serves the big parties and doesn't serve the ordinary Canadians. So how do Canadians participate in the political process? How do they make decisions? How do they control the decision makers? These are very important issues that have to be taken up but also the empowerment of each Canadian.

Violence and social change

I10

I think that there is a time and place for violence and it's different in different countries. I want to say that it isn't justified but, at the same time, if that is the only way that you will get your message across and that is the only way that you can change something and make the people in power listen [then you can’t dismiss it]... but it's definitely less accepted in our society then it is in other countries like in South America or even in Europe. But I think that it's a short lived activism. It's kind of like you light a fuse and then the fuse burns down, and down, and down and finally you have an explosion but after that explosion what is there? There's ash and bits of charred ground and I don't think that, in and of itself, can make lasting change. But there is a time and place for that explosion.

Resource wars

I25

Right now I think that the future is probably going to entail a lot of world crisis in terms of developing countries and resource wars and I think that'll probably hinge around three issues...peak oil, climate change, and natural resource depletion….I think resource wars are probably going to become more common. I think that as...climate change affects the world that Canada will probably gain a lot of population and be under pressure to exploit its natural resources a lot more. I'd suspect that we'll see this trend continue of sort of beefing up our borders and not letting people in almost like a worldwide [feudal] scenario, and I think that food and water are probably going to become the most valuable political tools...

Leadership not dictatorship

I24

Things can happen awful fast sometimes...and [when it does happen] I think that the Left needs to...be...there to try and pick up the pieces and give it some coordination and leadership. Because I do believe in leadership, I just don't believe in the form of leadership that dictates to everybody what should happen. We've never really had a democracy.

Anarchism and radical social change

I12

Eventually I came to [anarchism]... and a complete rejection of the entire system and seeing its destruction as the only possible solution. It didn't seem like it was hierarchical in any way. It didn't seem to be intimidating in the sense that you had to prove yourself to be a part of it or climb any kind of ranks or whatever, or find a place to be. You were just an individual making your own decisions and individual actions for what you saw as a potential for change.

No return

I22

I think the world is pregnant with dangers, to use an unfortunate metaphor, it's pregnant, it's full. War,...[w]e haven't even spoken about...the environmental crisis. People operate in sort of a linear epistemology and what we see with the environmental crisis, it's exponential. So in our lifetimes, ten, fifteen years down the road, it's not short, we could see even greater calamities because who knows how these complex systems interact? So there's all of these issues and so to solve all of these people need to realize that none of these can be solved by believing that...we can go back to the past and that these people [in power] can be pressured into going back into the past because history doesn't work that way.